By luck or design the breakthrough in Northern Ireland, facilitated by the easing of customs controls, came on the same day that trade between the EU and the rest of the UK became a whole lot more complex and costly.
The government’s imposition of long-delayed Brexit border controls, starting with health certificates for food and flowers, emphasised just how hard it has been to make the same controls disappear for Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland’s dual status both within the UK but the EU Customs Union was a necessary compromise to secure a hard Brexit and a soft land border on the island of Ireland.
But as the measures imposed on British business today demonstrate, Customs Union membership usually comes at the price of strict controls designed to protect biosecurity and the common market.
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So while Andrea Leadsom, today a junior health minister but in 2016 a prominent Brexiteer, was dismissing the £330m price of new customs controls as a cost business just had to swallow, her colleague Chris Heaton-Harris was heralding the removal of the same checks at the GB-NI border.
Those checks, which made the Irish Sea border real, were the pretext for the DUP to walk out of Stormont.
Convincing the party they can be removed was the key to winning its return.
The command paper published on Wednesday suggests that some, but not all, of the paperwork and physical checks have been removed.
First the easy part.
The government says there will be no “UK processes” for goods moving from NI to GB, though goods making the same…
